Always Our Media

My older son has a gift subscription to Time magazine. I was flipping through the current issue at lunch, and saw a full-page essay about Pope Francis’s recent remarks about gays in his press conference. The author? Gene Robinson, the retired Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, who made news years ago as the first openly gay bishop of the Episcopal Church.

It wasn’t just an editorial decision. In the essay, Bp Robinson says:

Pope Francis’ comments may be a baby step toward inclusion–but it is a step that should be greeted with optimism and hope that the church may one day welcome all of God’s children. If God is love, as Scripture attests, then surely God is gay love too.

Love that “surely.” And I love, in a hathotic way, that Bp Robinson takes it upon himself to describe the Pope’s actions in such demeaning terms. “Baby steps” indeed, as if the supreme pontiff, in his spiritual immaturity, requires tutoring in how to walk from Gene Robinson and his friends at Time.

I don’t really fault Bp Robinson for his point of view here. After all, he has made it central to his life and to his ministry. It’s not so much his point of view that chafes — after all, Robinson is a liberal Protestant — but his choice of words reflecting a condescending attitude towards the Bishop of Rome, whose status is rather more elevated than a retired Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire. Still, if Time calls and asks for your opinion, you give it. I don’t fault Bp Robinson for that at all.

But I do fault Time for poor news judgment in making the call in the first place. Is phoning a gay-activist Protestant bishop for his opinion really the best a national newsmagazine can do? It’s a disservice to the magazine’s readers, who deserve better than Bp Robinson’s boilerplate. Granted, Time wouldn’t dare reach out to a conservative Catholic for analysis (though calling one who would offer the right-wing version of Gene Robinson’s shtick would be scarcely more helpful to readers). But they could have called a thoughtful liberal Catholic writer like Peter Steinfels or Michael Sean Winters to offer his thoughts about Francis’s newsmaking comments. Commissioning an essay from Gene Robinson on this topic is the journalistic equivalent of phoning it in.

Besides, it requires a special kind of inside-the-bubble-ism for Time editors to think that Bishop Robinson has anything to teach the Roman pontiff about how to run his church with regard to homosexuals within it. Take a look at these numbers. In the United States, there are about 700,000 Episcopalians in church on Sunday morning. There are about 22 million Catholics at mass. That’s no reason for US Catholics to gloat. The US Catholic Church has suffered a steep decline in non-Hispanic massgoers; without the immigration-fueled Hispanic influx, it would be declining at pretty much the same rate as the Episcopalians. Still, it is vastly bigger than the liberal Episcopal Church, and overall, it is holding its own.

Not so the Episcopal Church. According to TEC’s own figures, the Diocese of New Hampshire lost about 10 percent of its attendance in its years under Bp Robinson’s leadership, and 19 percent from 2000 to 2010. The national Episcopal Church lost 23 percent of its Sunday churchgoers in that same decade — a stunning collapse. Not a single Episcopal diocese in that decade reported growth. Not one.

Practically every denomination — Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian — that has tried to adapt itself to contemporary liberal values has seen an Episcopal-style plunge in church attendance. Within the Catholic Church, too, the most progressive-minded religious orders have often failed to generate the vocations necessary to sustain themselves.

Both religious and secular liberals have been loath to recognize this crisis. Leaders of liberal churches have alternated between a Monty Python-esque “it’s just a flesh wound!” bravado and a weird self-righteousness about their looming extinction. (In a 2006 interview, the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop explained that her communion’s members valued “the stewardship of the earth” too highly to reproduce themselves.)

Liberal commentators, meanwhile, consistently hail these forms of Christianity as a model for the future without reckoning with their decline. Few of the outraged critiques of the Vatican’s investigation of progressive nuns mentioned the fact that Rome had intervened because otherwise the orders in question were likely to disappear in a generation. Fewer still noted the consequences of this eclipse: Because progressive Catholicism has failed to inspire a new generation of sisters, Catholic hospitals across the country are passing into the hands of more bottom-line-focused administrators, with inevitable consequences for how they serve the poor.

Again, if Bishop Robinson believes that truth and justice require liberal reform on homosexuality, then he must, in good conscience, say so. I don’t blame him. What I do blame is the editorial leadership at Time magazine, for seeking out the opinion of a leader in a failing church staggering toward demographic extinction, asking him to tell the leader of 1.2 billion Catholics around the world how to do his job like a grown-up. Time is not helping its readers understand basic realities and trends in religious life, but rather misleading them with groundless ideological optimism. Asking Bishop Robinson to comment on the Pope’s failure to be pro-gay enough is like asking Dick Cheney to write a piece advising President Obama how to build a thriving democracy in Iraq.

This is a failure of journalism. If Time is so willing to allow ideological wishful thinking to shape its religion coverage and commentary, how much can its other coverage be trusted as a reliable guide to the way the world is? I’m glad this was a gift subscription; we are getting what we paid for.

He tells of sitting next to the renowned atheist Richard Dawkins at a dinner and discussing God. Hall told Dawkins, “I don’t believe in the God you don’t believe in either.”

“That kind of atheism, though, is bankrupt. It’s like picking a fight with a cultural image no theologian would buy into. I don’t want to be loosey-goosey about it,” he says, “but I describe myself as a non-theistic Christian.”

And he goes on to expand on the concept.

“Jesus doesn’t use the word God very much,” he says. “He talks about his Father.”

Hall explains: “Where I am now, how do I understand Jesus as a son of God that’s not magical? I’m trying to figure out Jesus as a son of God and a fully human being, if he has both fully human and a fully divine set of chromosomes. . . . He’s not some kind of superman coming down. God is present in all human beings. Jesus was an extraordinary human being. Jesus didn’t try to convert. He just had people at his table.”

At this point, Hall leans back in his chair, a rueful smile on his face.

“This is like therapy,” he says. “I should lie down on the couch.”

Gary Hall has been dean of the National Cathedral for less than a year. He has taken on a huge job: The church is in need of money, and Episcopal congregations across the country are shrinking.

“We’re in a period where people under 50 don’t see the church as a credible place to explore their questions about God.” Instead, they see the church as obsessed with “survival and squabbles.” Interestingly enough, he says that young people these days seem to be drawn to monasteries for spiritual retreats.

Hall, of course, prides himself on his theological progressivism, especially on gay issues. OK, fine. But he tells Quinn that the National Cathedral, if it wants to survive, has to be “the spiritual hope of the nation.” And he says that if the Episcopal Church wants to survive, it has to liberalize, as he has done.

He gets no apparent challenge from Quinn, though there is an avalanche of data to belie these feelgood assertions by the rector. Come on, Washington Post, practice some damn journalism! I don’t expect a liberal Episcopalian to agree with me, for heaven’s sake, but I expect the leading newspaper in the nation’s capital to expect him to defend his easily falsifiable assertions. Then again, he’s only saying what Sally Quinn already believes, and probably most of the WaPo editorial staff too.

True, various church bodies have occasionally adapted and “modernized,” and in some cases those shifts have arguably been necessary or energizing.

But it would be–correction, you are–foolish for assuming that you know the precise list of issues on which the Church should liberalize in order to survive. If we were in the early Roman days of the Church, you could argue that, in order to attract a sustainable number of members, the Church should have endorses concubinage. And at no point in the Church’s history has its posture against extra-marital sex been popular.

The truth is, the Church’s most enduring appeal has always stemmed from its countercultural comportment. This was true in first-century Rome and it’s true now. No person honestly seeking truth enters a church to have his/her views–whether social, political, moral, or theological–corroborated. Those who do are in for a big disappointment wherever they end up. Arguing that the key to Christianity’s future is to embrace the dominant Weltanschauung reflects a profoundly misguided understanding of what the Church is and who Christ is.

(Moreover, the majority of issues on which the Church has “evolved” are secondary: acknowledging heliocentrism didn’t really change the fundamental image of the Church, nor did doing so make it more “attractive” to ordinary seekers of the time.)

Think of Galileo. Despite how controversial he was in his day, do you think the Church would be as robust as it is today if it still insisted that the sun evolved around the earth or that lending with interest is wrong? The Church continues to exist because it continues to adapt to modernity.

I don’t think these things are quite the same. Your usury example is more apt, because, like the Church’s teachings on homosexuality, it deals with behavior, rather than simple claims about the nature of the physical universe. Your usury example is actually a good one, and I need to give that one some thought. But I think “science” is beside the point here.

Science is arguably showing that predispositions to alcoholism, or pedophilia, or being a serial killer, among other things, are also genetic, or at least innate. That doesn’t mean that society, let alone the Church, is going to accept the proposition that just because these predispositions are innate, people born with them have license to act on them with impunity.

I don’t see how science “undermines” the Church’s position on homosexuality. The Church’s position is that homosexual activity — indeed, any activity other than heterosexual intercourse between a man and woman married to one another — is wrong. If science has anything to say about the moral rightness or wrongness of anything, I’m afraid I missed it. Just because it can presumably be demonstrated scientifically, for example, that people feel a sexual attraction to people other than their spouse, does that mean the Church is going to change its teaching on adultery? I rather doubt it.

At our tiny mission Catholic parish in Texas, even with a congregation that includes many elderly and retired people, there are quite a few young faces: babies, children, and most amazing of all, young teens who are still showing up every week–and not just showing up, but getting involved. There are young men and women who sing, lector, serve as altar servers and assist as extraordinary ministers of holy communion (and to those who gripe about the latter, in our parish on most Sundays Father has to leave our 8:30 Mass which ends about 9:30 and dash out the door to drive 25 minutes down the road to get to the main parish in time for their 10 a.m. Mass, so yes, we do sort of need the EMHCs at this point). The really amazing part–my fellow Catholics will get this–is that most of these kids are post-Confirmation, and are still choosing to show up and be present and serve every week. At 8:30 a.m. For Mass.

There are plenty of places for the young people in this generation to go to be affirmed in their okayness, or told how awful the Church is, or pressured to give in to the various popular sins. It gives me great hope for the future of the Church that so many of them still choose Christ. For some, the choice is simple and direct, while for others the path may have some detours and some lapses, but in the end, they still choose Christ.

Where is Christianity’s future? Is it in deciding that sexual sins aren’t sins any more, and really nothing much is, and Jesus is just a nice guy who wants us to be nice when it’s not too bothersome for us? Or is it here:

Erin, I liked that link. Thanks for posting it. That’s what I see in the youth in my church, too. I’ve been teaching Sunday School to the youth for a few years now. My church recently lowered the minimum missionary age from 19 and 21 to 18 and 19, so I’ve been watching 16- and 17-year-old kids excitedly preparing for their years of service by studying scriptures and attending seminary and giving joyful service. I hear a lot of dismal statements about youth falling away, but I see a lot of light-filled faces showing up at church. The future of the world may be full of turmoil, but the future of Christianity is bright.

spartacus- the RCC will not liberalize on SSM & Galileo wasn’t only about heliocentricism (a RC monk start the heliocentric ball rolling- Copernicus). Unlike the mainline protestant churches the RC Church will not overlook the clear scriptural injunctions- SSM, divorce etc. The liberal preoccupation with sexual license has destroyed the basis for the liberal church’s claim to authority- you can’t be based on sola scriptura yet denounce much of what is in the scripture. If you don’t have a yardstick to fall back on all becomes relative & debatable. You get laughable episodes where the presiding Bishop condemns St Paul for not recognizing the beauty inherent in demonic possession. The decline of the TEC is probably best summed up by ABp Schori’s contention that the TEC members don’t reproduce b/c they care too much about the environment.

Also, the traditional Christian position on homosexuality is not based on the Biblical prohibitions alone taken as a mystery. Rather, it is held to be rationally provable to be immoral and unnatural – in the terminology and framework of the Schoolmen this was supported by natural law (though the basic assumptions are the same in the other philosophical frameworks used by traditional Christians). And Gene Robinson’s against the traditional Christian sexual morality, here and any other ones I have come across, have been feeble: essentially, a question begging appeal to Love as sentimental affection alone.

To say homosexual orientation is no choice proves nothing. Pedophilic desire or desire for immoderate consumption of alcohol may also not be a choice, but this does not answer whether the desire is a good thing and whether acting on the desire is natural and moral.

No doubt, you and others who hold to the traditional teaching would rather belong to a smaller Church with what you believe is a “purer theology” than one determined by popular opinion. But those who are younger than you feel differently about homosexuality. So what happens when those who hold to the “purer theology” are too old to attend church and those who favor SSM are the ones who make up the “Church?”

“Those who are younger than you feel differently about homosexuality” is a statistical statement; it is simply not true that all young people feel homosexuality is okay. Those who do likely will not stay with the “purer theology” church, so they won’t be making it up. If they are, then the Church will die the way that the Episcopal Church is dying.

Also, there is an idea here that the acceptance of homosexuality is due to reason and true morality, rather than due to (a) a huge propaganda campaign, which ignores or shifts the blame for the negative consequences of homosexuality (what if we treated smoking the way we treat homosexuality?) (b) the fact that the easy availability of sexual temptation in our culture has led most of us astray, and many people interpret ”judge not” to mean ” it’s okay to be sexually licentious as long as you condone sexual licentiousness for everyone else, (c) the huge emphasis on individualism and sentimentality in our culture, and (d) the idea in our culture that the most important commandment is “thou shalt not frustrate any desire you have.”

What if there are good reasons to oppose the normalization of homosexuality, and what happens when these come back and bite us?

People seem to ignore the fact that liberalism is destroying the west from within. Europe and America are both letting hostile cultures invade and overtake them.

If we could enjoy a modern society like the one we have had for the past fifty years or so, maybe you would have a point. But all of the things of liberalism that make it so attractive and that have routed conservatism for so long – they are about to destroy the very structure that supports them.

David J. White wrote: “I don’t see how science “undermines” the Church’s position on homosexuality. The Church’s position is that homosexual activity — indeed, any activity other than heterosexual intercourse between a man and woman married to one another — is wrong. If science has anything to say about the moral rightness or wrongness of anything, I’m afraid I missed it.”

You have not missed anything. I’m not arguing that science dictates moral rightness or wrongness and that the Church will ultimately have to follow a moral code that is determined by science. If you take a look at the comments I made prior to the one you responded to you’ll see I’m making a different argument.

I’m arguing that as more and more Christians (especially younger Christians) accept the scientific fact that both homosexuality and heterosexuality are biologically determined and, therefore, beyond anyone’s control, they will find it patently unfair that people who were born a certain way are condemned for having sex with the persons they are attracted to. They will then have to reconcile this unfairness with their perception of an eternally fair and loving God. In order to reconcile those two concepts, they will look for a different understanding of the Biblical prohibitions on homosexuality. Scientific facts, along with social and economic conditions, don’t alter Biblical texts, but they do drive new interpretations of Biblical texts.

Think about how our understanding and perception of homosexuality have changed within the past 50-100 years and compare that to the change in our understanding and perception of, say, adultery. Adultery is much more widespread and commonly practiced, yet no one considers it to be morally okay – not even adulterers. [Of course, most people think it should be legal, but that's because they don't think it's the govt's business.] Ordinarily, you’d think that as a practice becomes more widespread, it would become more morally acceptable. That hasn’t happened with adultery.

Homosexuality, however, has become more morally accepted over time even though it is somewhat rare and its frequency levels have remained constant. I would argue that its acceptance has increased as we’ve learned that sexual orientation is beyond a person’s control. We’re not willing to condemn people for something that is entirely beyond their control. And, as I state above, more and more people find it patently unfair to condemn people for having sex with the only gender they’re attracted to if they had absolutely no choice in forming that attraction.

Beyng wrote: “But it would be–correction, you are–foolish for assuming that you know the precise list of issues on which the Church should liberalize in order to survive.”

Maybe, but wouldn’t you be equally foolish for assuming you know the precise list of issues on which the Church shouldn’t liberalize?

We’re both making predictions about things that aren’t going to happen until well in the future. The difference is that I’m looking at the current views of the younger people who will comprise the Church in the future and saying that, based on their current acceptance of homosexuality, they are likely to employ a liberalized view when they ascend to positions of influence in the Church. You seem to be saying that despite their beliefs, they will continue to enforce a position with which they disagree.

John of Dorset wrote: “Rather, [homosexuality] is held to be rationally provable to be immoral and unnatural . . . ”

When given ample opportunity to prove that homosexuality was objectively harmful, the supporters of Proposition 8 failed miserably. That doesn’t mean that the current prevailing interpretation of Biblical texts on homosexuality don’t condemn it, but that’s a very different thing from saying it is rationally provable to be harmful.

Further, no one with even a passing familiarity with science would argue that homosexuality is not a natural occurrence.

Re: I think you’ll find that Roman Church’s teaching hasn’t actually changed on usury. It is simply ignored. Traditional Christian teaching on the subject is clear and forceful, though it was never quite so simple as to say all lending at interest was wrong.

John of Dorset,

I actually disagree with you on homosexuality, but I think you’re at least partially right here: capitalist society proceeded by simply ignoring what Christians had to say (and still have to stay today) about lending at interest.

Re: If science has anything to say about the moral rightness or wrongness of anything, I’m afraid I missed it.

David White,

That’s not really the point here, as I see it. The traditional condemnations of homosexuality, both in Paul and in the patristic sources (whatever weight you give them), focused on the idea that it was a perversion of the natural sexual inclination. That is the only solid and consistent *reason* to condemn it, and without that you simply boil down to ‘Paul and Leviticus say it’s bad’, which is, of course, unconvicning. Science itself doesn’t really tell us what’s right or wrong, but it can certainly cast doubt on a particular moral argument by undermining its factual premises.

Re: What if there are good reasons to oppose the normalization of homosexuality, and what happens when these come back and bite us?

I think the issue is that increasingly, people don’t see any good reasons to oppose the normalization of homosexuality. And it’s odd that you cite ‘hostile cultures invading Europe and America’: you do realise that those hostile enemy civilizations are bitterly opposed to homosexuality, right?

Re: but this does not answer whether the desire is a good thing and whether acting on the desire is natural and moral.

John of Dorset,

I think the problem here is you’re begging the question: can you provide any reason why acting on the desire is *not* natural or moral? In the case of alcoholism, I can provide many.

Spartacus, I’m not sure it says much, either way, what the supporters of a Californian proposition proved, or at least proved to you.

Hector_St_Clare,

You yourself hint at why homosexual desire is unnatural. It undermines the natural end, or telos, of our sexual faculties (reproduction in the broadest sense of raising healthy adults and the joining of man and woman), and it perverts the natural bringing together of the two poles of humanity, male and female, in a balanced and beneficial way.

To act on homosexual desire is, therefore, to pervert the ends of our sexual organs and desires, which is to become less human, less good. It is to entertain a lust that can never bring about the higher sorts of Love and bonds and which, rather, will lead but to an unbalanced and perverted order in the soul – or, at least, that is their tendency.

I’m not sure what science has to say against classical natural law, or any similar, traditional moral framework, on these issues. Of course, to point to homosexual behaviour in animals is a howler – you might as well point to club feet as a refutation of the natural law claim it is the final cause of legs to walk. The only other science (at least somewhat) derived objection that is sometimes brought up is that homosexual behaviour is beneficial for species – but this, apart from being a point at least partially not scientific, is quite speculative and unproven.

I’m not sure contemporary mores are much too be proud of, so the normalisation of homosexuality as part of them, to me at least, is no recommendation of the practice.

Also, although it was my original point that traditional Christian don’t just rely on the Bible, it is not just Paul and Leviticus that tell us it is bad. Essentially, whilst many have not prohibited it so absolutely and completely, almost all traditional human societies have said it was bad – at least in the sense of treating homosexual acts as something marginal, to be avoided, and generally inferior (claims of modernists lacking all proportion based on ambiguous and marginal facts and sources not withstanding).

I’m arguing that as more and more Christians (especially younger Christians) accept the scientific fact that both homosexuality and heterosexuality are biologically determined and, therefore, beyond anyone’s control, they will find it patently unfair that people who were born a certain way are condemned for having sex with the persons they are attracted to. They will then have to reconcile this unfairness with their perception of an eternally fair and loving God.

In other words, God would not stop people from fulfilling their desires. To modern man, the only true sin is frustrating the fulfilling of one’s desires. I don’t think that this is a good argument from a Christian perspective.

When given ample opportunity to prove that homosexuality was objectively harmful, the supporters of Proposition 8 failed miserably.

At least for male homosexuality, the very nature of maleness means that it is more promiscuous, and the tremendous amount of venereal disease associated with it is well-documented. It’s just that we are supposed to believe that somehow allowing gay marriage will tame them into monogamy (instead of altering marital mores against monogamy) and that negative health consequences must all be blamed somehow on homophobia.

NFR: I have to disagree with you on the Time headline reporting the Lawrence case. That was a very prescient headline. Justice Scalia said the same thing in his dissent. — RD

Well, you and Justice Scalia would wouldn’t you? You each offered us the mirror image of the most militant gay activists. They want what they want, and the law is only a means to an end, and you want to discredit them, so “the sky is falling” becomes the immediate interpretation.

What neither the whining narcissists among the gay movement, nor the chicken littles of the opposition to SSM have done is take a sober look at the constitutional principles involved. Emotional reaction is a poor substitute for sober jurisprudence.

Of course we all have our pre-existing preferences. You want to raise the alarm, the gay movement wants full acceptance and even mandatory adoration, and I, before the decision was made, already wanted a nuanced response (pardon my French), which would recognize the right to be left alone, so eloquently argued by Justice Louis Brandeis, but would not force anyone to “accept” what they in fact abhor.

Adversarial law is based on opposing parties who have an interest in a certain outcome. The job of the judges is to dispassionately apply consistent legal principles to the facts presented, rather than to decide “who’s my favorite today?” like it was a partisan battle of the greens vs. the blues in old Byzantium.

The right to privacy is one thing. The equal protection of the laws is quite another. The fact that you’ve missed that distinction, instead being blinded by culture-war gang rumbles, is one reason you are losing. You were so anxious to sound the alarm you fell into the hands of your enemies like a ripe apple.

Probably the long term trend would have been toward greater acceptance of gays, and I believe that would be the right way to go. Homosexuality may be an unfortunate epigenetic accident of an imprecise biology, it certainly doesn’t reunite the Adam, but its 100 percent of life to those who turn out with a desire for their own sex. But a more thoughtful critique could have headed off Judge Walker’s ruling, and the narrow-minded infatuation of the 9th Circuit panel that reviewed it.

[NFR: I repeat: the Time headline, like Justice Scalia, was correct. The ruling overturning DOMA rested in part on the Lawrence precedent. So will a future ruling constitutionalizing same-sex marriage. -- RD]

I repeat: the Time headline, like Justice Scalia, was correct. The ruling overturning DOMA rested in part on the Lawrence precedent. So will a future ruling constitutionalizing same-sex marriage.

You are repeating yourself, but you are not explaining yourself. OK, let me try this from another angle. If you are tracing a change in social and cultural attitudes toward homosexuality, you might well be able to set forth a chronology that after this came that. (Cue Franklin, “post hoc…”) But CULTURALLY one may well follow the other, in terms of the popular will and what the public will vote for.

If you are providing information and analysis to educate a reasonably informed citizenry about the jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court, one thing does not lead to another in the same manner. Newsweek did a piss-poor job of reporting on a Supreme Court decision.

I have a copy of the Windsor decision on my desktop, so I can check casual off-hand references. The Lawrence case is mentioned exactly twice in the opinion of the court, multiple times in Justice Scalia’s dissent. Incidentally, Scalia acknowledges that Lawrence was not an equal protection case, even makes a point of it.

Lawrence is tangentially relevant to Windsor only linked to the fact that New York state has made a legislative (not judicial or constitutional) decision to recognize same-sex marriages. Windsor essentially says that the federal government cannot rely on what a state says is a marriage in all cases EXCEPT when a state recognizes a same-sex couple as a marriage.

Again, if you simply look at this as “the courts are for the gay agenda” or “the courts are against the gay agenda” you can cheer or boo every new decision, but that’s not the way the courts make decisions. Scalia said something about that in one of the abortion cases… decrying that certain friend of the court briefs are calling on their life-tenured judges, granted that tenure precisely so they can follow the law, rather than the popular will, to follow the popular will.

Lawrence rested on the right to privacy. The “marriage equality” case, when presented in the courts, is premised on the equal protection of the laws, a different legal standard, from a different part of the constitution.

Anybody who sincerely advocates strict construction of the constitution, and decries judicial activism, should understand and embrace the difference. Those who pass over this distinction are merely a mob agitating for their preferred outcome — which has its place in the legislative arena, but not in the courts.

Someone please READ the Lawrence decision and then construct a legal argument, relying on that case as your foundation, which requires that all states must license same sex marriages. All I’ve heard is “gay marriage is a good thing and that’s why since Lawrence marriage equality is mandatory” or why its a really bad idea but inevitable. Reason FROM Lawrence and try to find your way to that conclusion. It can’t be done.

But then, I’ve continued to say that if a government ever comes to power committed to a vast program of social engineering, which includes MANDATING abortion in certain circumstances, for the good of society, for the protection of the child, whatever, all the Christian legal service firms rushing to federal court for an injunction to stop the operation of the law will find their only really on point citation favoring their argument will be… Roe v. Wade! Why? Because it was not a “pro-abortion” decision. It was a decision that limited the jurisdiction of The State in favor of individual choice. If the government has no jurisdiction to forbid, on the grounds that its a private matter for the individual woman, that leaves the government with no jurisdiction to mandate either.

Are all the “conservatives” here so entranced with cultural implications and judicial activism that nobody can see that? If so, its the conservatives who have rendered the Constitution a meaningless piece of paper, which may eventually take the First Amendment as well.